A trim white clapboarded and black-shuttered home surrounded by lush gardens in East Hampton, The 1770 House hotel is all colonial charm and comfort, with antique furnishings, patterned pastel wallpaper, exposed wood beams and built-in bookshelves. Keeping the nostalgia in check are flatscreen TVs, free WiFi and iPod docks. No mere B&B, this boutique hotel also has a fantastic restaurant serving locally sourced meats and seafood, as well as a historic tavern in the basement.

Smith Extra

Get this when you book through us:

20 per cent off any treatment (massage, facial, peel) at Naturopathica Spa on Montauk Highway in East Hampton

Also

At the hotel

Our favourite rooms

For a family or two couples, the elegant cream-beige Carriage House is a two-bedroom, two-bathroom cottage in the garden that’s more urban in style than the main house – with khaki-cream plain walls, vaulted ceilings upstairs and gleaming cherry furniture. Romantic Room Six with softly patterned fawn wallpaper and coral-blossomed curtains should really be called the Garden Room, with its private porch entrance onto the lawn. And oyster-striped Room Five feels like a private cosy-cream annexe, in the attic with its own staircase and separate bathroom.

Poolside

None on site, but you can use the pool and patio tucked behind a thicket of white pines at sister property, East Hampton Point (up Three Mile Harbor Road).

Packing tips

A cashmere layer to take the chill off terrace dining or ocean-side evening strolls.

Also

No pets. You’ll need to stay at least three nights over July, August and public-holiday weekends.

Children

The hotel is primarily for adults, although children are welcomed. Book a cot for US$75.

Dress Code

Hotel restaurant

In this candlelit 12-table dining room, oriental rugs, rattan chairs and floral seat cushions feel as homely as Thanksgiving at auntie’s, but chef Michael Rozzi’s menu, featuring dishes such as hand-cut fettucine with house-made rabbit sausage or seared montauk fluke with butternut squash broth, is no turkey, with ingredients that are seasonal and local wherever possible. Take it onto the terrace and dine around the fountain on starlit summer nights.

Hotel bar

Historic speakeasy, the Tavern is a small, dimly lit bar in the basement with bench seating, stained glass windows and exposed brickwork. Here, you can dine informally on burgers, oysters, clams and the like. A cosier spot for a glass of cabernet is the library in the main house, which has fireside sofas.

Last orders

10pm; drinks can be ordered to your room until the Tavern bar closes, between 10.30pm and midnight.

Room service

Order anything from the restaurant menu (iced oysters, for example) during restaurant hours, from 5.30pm.

Location

Address

The 1770 House

143 Main Street

East Hampton

11937

United States

Planes

The nearest airport is Islip MacArthur (+1 631 467 3210; www.macarthurairport.com), 50 miles from East Hampton (around a 90-minute drive). JFK and LaGuardia are both around 80 miles away. If you’re feeling fancy, arrive at East Hampton Airport by seaplane with Sound Aircraft Services (+1 631 537 2202).

Trains

Long Island Rail Road’s Montauk line (www.lirr.org) will get you to East Hampton from New York's Penn Station in just under three hours. The Cannonball (express train), departing on Fridays in the summer, is even faster.

Automobiles

For car hire, Avis have a desk at MacArthur Airport. Bus options along the Long Island Expressway include the Hampton Luxury Liner and Hampton Jitney.

Other

Yacht-owning seafarers can sail the Long Island Sound and moor up somewhere in Gardiners Bay or Three Mile Harbour.

Worth getting out of bed for

Slope off to a day-bed in the garden and lose yourself in a novel until your eyelids droop. If you must leave the house, traditional Hamptons pursuits include browsing the galleries in East Hampton and Sag Harbor; trawling the boutiques outside your door on Main Street and the Circle; hanging with the surf crowd in boho Montauk; whiling the day away on the beach – try mansion-fringed Coopers Beach in Southampton or the sandy flats of Main Beach in East Hampton.

Local restaurants

Long-standing Hamptons favourite, Nick & Toni’s on North Main Street (+1 631 324 3550; www.nickandtonis.com) serves rustic Italian fare, including pizza in summer, from the mosaic-clad wood-fired oven at the heart of this three-room trattoria. Lunch on griddled flatbread pizza or perfectly cooked pasta in a leather booth or outdoors at Milanese eatery, Cittanuova on Newtown Lane (+1 631 324 6300; www.cittanuova.com). White linen and navy upholstery remind you you’re marina-side in the restaurant at East Hampton Point on Three Mile Harbor Road – as do the unimpeded sunset views of boats bobbing in the harbour and the just-caught seafood on the menu.

Local cafés

Local bars

The hotel bar at the Maidstone on Main Street (+1 631 324 5440; www.themaidstone.com) is somewhere to linger over the 200-strong wine list or sample local microbrews in an informal but sophisticated setting.

Reviews

Anonymous review

Mr Smith and I like summer in the Hamptons as much as the next sweaty, chlorophyll-starved New Yorker. The sea air! The lobster lunches! The polo parties and charity auctions! It’s a fizzy scene but for us, it always, abruptly, goes flat. ‘Gotten sceney,’ is Mr Smith’s shorthand for the syndrome, muttered into his flute, at which point I can see that mentally he’s already westbound on the Long Island Expressway.

This show-off summer theatre closes promptly after Labor Day. The shutters come down on those preppy pieces of priceless real estate, and the wide white beaches, four Ralph Lauren boutiques, and ritzy restaurants empty out. You can actually get a table and have a conversation over the pan-seared scallops at the Meeting House in Amagansett. The danger of tripping over fake boobs on East Hampton’s Main Beach drops to nil, and the ocean is in its paddling prime. This, in our opinion, is the best time of year to go.

We were congratulating ourselves on our off-season savvy as we sauntered to the Hampton Jitney stop at 39th Street and Third Avenue, only to be confronted by an enormous line of people. Thank God Mr Smith had booked seats. Our little secret, it seemed, was out. On board was the usual cross-section of Manhattan Hamptoneers: the Tory Burch shod, the Wall Street Journal readers, a couple of nannies and their charges, and enough iPads to stock the Spring Street Apple store. But we had one thing that they didn’t: a reservation at 1770 House, whitewashed, weather-boarded, and East Hampton’s cutest inn.

1770 House was actually built in 1663: it’s named after the year it became an inn. When we tipped up at reception, there was a fire crackling in the grate – is there a more soothing autumn sound? – and the aroma of something wonderful wafting from the kitchen. Our room, in the eaves of the building, was not fancy, but extremely comfortable in a granny's spare-room kind of way, with striped, sprigged wallpaper, a whopping bed, and soft sheets of doubtlessly astronomical thread count. We just had time to wash up (the house brand is Molton Brown) before descending for dinner in the oak-paneled restaurant. Crossing the parlour’s bare-wood floor, I went into a dramatic skid – what was in those animal crackers I had on the Jitney anyway? – only righting myself inches from a wing chair. ‘Hungry, darling?’ said Mr Smith, gliding up, taking my arm, and not letting go of it until I was seated.

'I'm going to forget I'm vegetarian tonight,' said Mr Smith, as he studied the meat-feast menu. We started by splitting a salad of endive and apple studded with crispy pork belly, and two cheeses, a Rogue Smokey Blue from Oregon and a Brillat Savarin. For the main event, Mr Smith went for Angus Beef short ribs and I one-upped him with a vast Berkshire pork chop that had wallowed in cider before being whacked on the grill, giving it a fruity, boozy flavor, a clever, more complex alternative to apple sauce. The inn has won accolades for its extensive wine list (16 pages), and the malbec Mr Smith chose proved to be a velvety complement to our comfort-food spread.

We lingered long after the other guests (couples and family parties) had departed, autumn in the Hamptons being an-early-to-bed sort of affair, and then ascended to our cozy nook. Mr Smith was keen to snuggle in front of 'Sex and the City' (one dividend of dating a metrosexual), and he was hoping to find his favorite show, Catch-38, on pay-per-view. But the inn is not the land of 500 cable channels, and we were reduced to watching the strangely compelling 'Say Yes to the Dress'. Five episodes and countless bouffant creations later, we drifted off, dreaming of tiaras and organza.

We awoke to leafy shadows dancing across the walls, a gorgeous morning for biking and beach. After homemade buttermilk pancakes swimming in maple syrup, we set off to Bermuda Bikes, and thence to Main Beach, which once again had gone to the dogs and their walkers. We gawped at the shingled showstoppers lining the dunes, then jumped back on our steeds in search of more real-estate porn on the roads that peeled off Lily Pond Lane.

No weekend away is complete without a boozy lunch, and we had ours with a side of margarita pizza at the bar at Cittanuova in East Hampton. Mrs Smith always finds that a carafe makes Mr Smith more amenable to shopping, and true to form, he gamely traipsed trough Catherine Malandrino, Theory, Ralph Lauren, and J Crew. I rewarded him at Dylan's Candy Bar with a generous helping of cola bottles, fizzy fish, sour cherries, and a souvenir tin of hot chocolate.

Back at 1770, we sat in front of the fire with a couple of glasses of red, and plotted the evening meal, settling on an East Hampton classic, Nick and Toni's. The dirty martinis were reliably lethal, the frisée with chicken livers (Mrs Smith loves an organ) recommended by the server was divine, and the linguine with clams tasted like a piquant ocean breeze. The average age in the room was 60-something, but we've always fancied ourselves young fogies. 'Give me a button-down shirt and a peppermint tea over a skinny jean and a can of PBR in the Lower East Side any Saturday night,' said Mr Smith, before musing on how long it would take us to save up for one of those Lily Pond pads. 'Maybe in the next life,' I offered.

So comfortable had we become in our country cocoon that we skidded right past check-out time on Sunday morning. And this, we decided, was the greatest boon of 1770 House. It may not be the flashiest Hamptons hostelry, but it feels like home, and when a Lily Pond pile is not in your future, you can’t ask for more.

The Guestbook

Whenever you book a stay at a Smith hotel or villa, we’ll invite you to review it when you get back. Read what other Smith members had to say in The 1770 House’s Guestbook below.

We loved

You get very personalized care. It's very small but in a great location. Randye London the innkeeper is a wealth of knowledge with the best personality. The restaurant and outside patio are lovely.

Don’t expect

A spa, quick service to your room for glassware, pillow requests etc. Modern bathrooms.